Adult Nationals Badminton Tournament coming to Westborough

Friday

Mar 21, 2014 at 9:49 PMMar 21, 2014 at 10:01 PM

The Adult Nationals Tournament for badminton has been played on the West Coast for well over a decade. Next week that will change. The tournament is coming east, specifically to the Boston Badminton Club in Westborough, hosted by the Massachusetts Badminton Association. The tournament will be held next Friday to Sunday.

By Dan CagenDaily News staff

The Adult Nationals Tournament for badminton has been played on the West Coast for well over a decade.Next week that will change.The tournament is coming east, specifically to the Boston Badminton Club in Westborough, hosted by the Massachusetts Badminton Association. The tournament will be held next Friday to Sunday."We're really, really pleased to have the opportunity to host the tournament here, where we have been having a significant growth [in badminton] here," Massachusetts Badminton Association president Beth Sopka said. "We put the bid to get it here because we want to make it easy to get our second- and third-ranked players to get into this tournament to get that experience so that it will help their development and growth."For several decades, badminton has mostly been popular in the United States on the West Coast. Sopka says there are more players in the Northeast region that are playing over the last few years, and having the tournament here will foster that growth."There are two aspects of development and growth I'm hoping for," Sopka said. "One is that there's only so much you can do with training. You have to have good competition and if you only compete against the same group of people from one day to the next, you need to branch out. We do have some people coming from the West Coast, which is really the dominant area now. We have some back and forth with them, but the more we can make, the better."Competing against the higher-ranked people without having to spend the big bucks for traveling and the three-hour time difference and that sort of stuff, we're trying to level the playing field for our players."The second piece is to grow the spectator base. We want people who know about badminton and who enjoys playing it at their clubs to see who the top players and know who they are, and the people from our clubs and to see how they size up against the elite players. To raise the understanding, the spectators of who know about it, and to increase the number of people who can see it, it's big to have it here."The tournament is for national points, but does not factor into the international rankings, so not all of the top Americans will be there. The top-ranked woman, Bei Wen Zhang of Nevada, will be in attendance, as will the second-ranked man, Howard Shu of California.There are 31 players from Massachusetts who will be competing.The Boston Badminton Club also hosted the trials to select the team for the 2012 London Olympics, held in December 2011."We have a quality badminton venue, which is what has allowed us to do this event," Sopka said. "It's an excellent venue that was built three years ago. Our growth was limited in running events because we didn't have a place to play. We had to rent gyms and it cost money. Now we have eight courts, proper lights, proper flooring. It's the best badminton venue west of Japan and east of California."Dan Cagen can be reached at 508-626-3848 or dcagen@wickedlocal.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanCagen.

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